The present invention relates to image processing devices and methods, and more particularly, to apparatus and methods for enhancing image definition.
An image input/output devices, such as a digital still camera (DSC), a camcorder, and a digital television (DTV), may be costly due to the use of a high-definition image sensor capable of processing high-quality and high-definition images, and an accompanying larger memory compared to low-definition devices. Several techniques, such as zooming a low-definition image to a high-definition image, have been introduced for cost reduction.
During a zooming procedure, image degradation may occur because of the noise, blurring, and smearing of images, etc. To relieve such image degradation, definition enhancing techniques that emphasize details of an image and sharpen boundaries may be used.
A conventional definition enhancing technique may process the whole image using a single unsharp mask filter (UMF) coefficient. This technique may excessively enhance definition in an area where there is little color change in an image, thus leading to image degradation. In particular, there may be more areas with a slight color change in a high-definition image and, therefore, image degradation becomes more serious in the high-definition image.